BESPOKE COURSE DEVELOPMENT

You may need to deliver training to your staff in a new policy/process/system or you may want to put together a package for new staff on how your company works.

Whatever the project is, we can help you design, develop and deliver a training package to suit your requirements. It might be a simple one off course or, as below, a full training programme to support a major project.

Example training for youth justice organisations

As a result of working on the AssetPlus project for 3 years we continue to offer training to youth justice organisations in relation to Assessment and Planning.

This can be tailored to focus on particular areas of the framework in which you feel practitioners or managers need additional training in. However, we have put together some suggested topic areas below based on the most common challenges in transitioning from Asset to AssetPlus.

Below are the details of bespoke training programmes we offer to youth justice organisations:

*Please note: there are no course durations shown as this depends on your requirements, please use the enquiry form to advise and we will respond.

Achieve quality with limited time in Information Gathering

We have heard many practitioners saying that 'it takes forever to complete information gathering' or 'I find the questions encourage me to repeat myself'. We believe this is due to the fact that they are answering questions as they would in Asset rather than limiting their answer to specifically what the question is asking for.

To address this we recommend working through a completed example with your managers/practitioners to get them to consider how questions are being answered and prompting them where they may not have understood their scope.

Explain behaviour & rate factors without repeating yourself

Practitioners often find themselves repeating their offence descriptions, risk factors and significant life events here because they are not clear that they should actually be hypothesising what the links are between them, i.e. how have the risks/life events have influenced the young person's behaviour.

To address this we recommend walking through some tips with your practitioners/managers on how to structure this analysis, followed by running an exercise to put those tips into practice by improving a completed example.

We have seen many cases where risks are not effectively drawn out in AssetPlus because the practitioner either doesn't understand the broad scope of these questions or they are not clear how to identify and evidence them.

To address this we recommend re-stating what your practitioners should reflect on in identifying these risks, followed up with an exercise to practice identifying and recording them for an example case. This can trigger some debate about what risks and impacts should be included but this in itself is helpful to clarify the position for your practitioners.

Ensure risks & risk factors are effectively addressed in P&P

The most frequent concerns raised by practitioners around Pathways and Planning is that 'it doesn't give sufficient consideration to risks/controls' and 'its not clear how the whole plan fits together'. We believe this is due to a lack of understanding of what information should be recorded and where in the plan.

To address this we recommend explaining to your practitioners what should be captured in each sub-section, highlighting where risk/control information should be included, followed by completing the key sub-sections for an example case.

QA approaches to check quality with limited time

As a result of the scale of change associated with AssetPlus I'm aware that some managers are struggling with the volume of work associated with quality assuring their team's assessments and plans.

To address this we can provide some guidance (on one page!) as to what we believe are the key things are to look for. This should provide a reasonable basis for you to develop your own local QA tools/approach. As part of this course we would work through this with managers using a completed example to ensure the various points are fully understood.

Identify flexible approaches for different stages/case types

Many YOTs are struggling to establish how they use AssetPlus in different stages or for different case types when it may not be pragmatic to complete the entire framework.

Whilst AssetPlus is mandated for a number of case types there are very few specific questions that are mandated. We can provide some suggestions to YOTs about how to use the framework more pragmatically for cases where it isn't mandated or in situations where there are significant time constraints.